Thought Leadership

SPO: How do buyers get started?

November 13, 2018

By Jon Cooke, VP of Global Agency Sales

SPO: How do buyers get started?

A good place to start with Supply Path Optimization is to develop a scorecard. That scorecard should evaluate your SSP or your Exchange based on criterion like the depth and breadth of their supply, their global reach, whether or not they adhere to strict brand safety requirements, whether or not they are ads.txt or GDPR compliant, but also how transparent they are. Are they disclosing fees? Are they candid about take rate? Those are all good criterion.

SPO: Can Rubicon Project help?

Over the last ten months we’ve had a number of our agencies and brands approach us and asked us to participate, as they do with other SSPs, in a supply path audit, or an SSP audit. After having done that a number of times, we figured it would make sense and benefit buyers and Rubicon Project alike to develop our own scorecard. So what we’re building is a score sheet based on some of the criterion I mentioned earlier, like ads.txt compliance, brand safety, GDPR compliance, but also other things like the costs that are passed in the transaction, through an SSP, the robustness of data that comes through in the bidstream, and even things like inventory avails and scale. Using a scorecard like that is a logical first step in the Supply Path Optimization process.

My name is Jon Cooke, I’m the Vice President of Global Agency Sales at Rubicon Project in New York, New York.